The UK parliamentary farce over #DRIP showed us that, more than any other industry, the political machine is in dire need of disruption.

In my latest Guardian column, How the Kickstarter model could transform UK elections, I suggest that the way that minority politicians could overcome the collective action deadlock of voters being unwilling to “throw away” their ballots on the parties they support, and so holding their nose and voting for the mainstream party they hate least, or not voting at all, by taking a page out of Kickstarter’s playbook:

Here’s how that could work:

“Yellow Party! Well, I love what you stand for, but come on, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance. It’s throwing away my vote.”

“Oh, I’m not asking you to vote for me! Not quite, anyway. All I want you to do is go on record saying that you would vote for me, if 20% of your neighbours made the same promise. Then, on election day, we’ll send you a text or and email letting you know how many people there are who’ve made the same promise, and you get to decide whether it’s worth your while.

“The current MP, Ms Setforlife, got elected with only 8,000 votes in the last election. If I can show you that 9,000 of your neighbours feel the same way as you do, and if you act on that information – well, we could change everything.”

This threshold-style action system is at the heart of Kickstarter (pledge whatever you like, but no one has to spend anything unless enough money is raised to see the project to completion) and it’s utterly adaptable to elections.

In democracies all over the world, voting is in decline. A permanent political class has emerged, and what it has to offer benefits a small elite at the public’s wider expense.

How the Kickstarter model could transform UK elections

In my latest Guardian column, What Canada’s national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC, I look at the punishing cuts to the CBC, and how a shelved (but visionary) BBC plan to field a “creative archive” of shareable and remixable content could help the network lead the country into a networked, participatory future.

The CBC, at least, has only limited delusions about the importance of commercialising its archives, especially when that comes at the expense of access to the archives for Canadians. Canada is a young nation, and the CBC has been there with Canadians for about half of the country’s short life. The contents of the CBC’s archives are even more central to the identity of Canadians that the BBC’s is to Britons.

If the CBC is to be cut and remade as a digital-first public service entity, then a Canadian Creative Archive could be one way for it to salvage some joy from its misery. There’s nothing more “digital first” than ensuring that the most common online activities – copying, sharing, and remixing – are built into the nation’s digital heritage.

What’s more, the CBC’s situation is by no means unique. In an era of austerity, massive wealth inequality, industrial-scale tax-evasion and totalising market orthodoxy, there’s hardly a public broadcaster anywhere in the world that isn’t facing brutal cuts that go to the bone and beyond.

All of these broadcasters have something in common: they produced their massive archives at public expense, for the public’s benefit, and have made only limited progress in giving the public online access to those treasures.

What Canada’s national public broadcaster could learn from the BBC